“Customer number 7, your shower is ready,” says the overhead intercom at a Love’s gas station truck stop along highway US-69 south in Oklahoma, though I might still be in Kansas. I’m not sure where I am. I pulled in at midnight after 11 hours of driving—700 miles from Minneapolis straight south to warmer weather—one of my main reasons for this trip that I’ll be on for the next 2-4 months.
I love Love’s. I remember my first stop for an overnight at one nearly a year ago. More than just a truck stop, I’d read that you can park your RV here and sleep for no charge. Somewhat dubious, I asked the cashier if I could indeed do this and she half-grinned at my stupid question: “Of course,” she said. I felt like singing the national anthem. This country! They even have electrical hookups for your RV so that if you wanted to, and you were insane, you could camp at Love’s indefinitely.
At every Love’s I’ve been to there’s always a fast-food restaurant attached—this one is a Carl’s Jr., the wayward cousin of Hardee’s. But when I woke to the pinched whoosh of semi-truck air brakes and a light drizzle I settled instead by rolling the gastrointestinal dice on a lukewarm bacon and egg breakfast taco from under a warming lamp in the station.
One half of the Love’s parking lot is for autos and the other half, demarcated by a fence and small boulevard, is a larger area for semi trucks. Across the street is a small, rundown Super 8 in case you’re tired of sleeping in the cab of your truck or your camper. It’s 46 degrees at 9 a.m. and I’m on my way to Frisco, TX, another 300 miles, for a football game I don’t care about featuring the team of a college (South Dakota State University–SDSU) I vaguely recall attending for 3 years from 1996-99. I never attended a football game during my time there, and I’ve never watched SDSU on TV, but I’m set to pay $105 for a ticket to this national championship of SDSU vs Montana (update: SDSU won).
My best memories of my time at SDSU were with my roommate and lifelong friend Joel, and since he and my friend Mike are here for the game I took a several hundred mile detour for a couple days of reverie and the great American pastime of college football and alcohol abuse.
We are staying at a Staybridge Inn and Suites where, in the parking lot, I so expertly maneuvered my truck and trailer into such a small parking area (just a foot to spare on the front and back) that I considered having the hotel concierge page all guests to come and wonder at the magnificence of my feat, to have them gather round while I gave a victory speech and warned of the coming evils of fully automated driving and the impotence it would instill in us as the robots take over yet another of our vital human skills. Skills that some of us would prefer to keep to ourselves since we excel at them at a near olympian level.
A word about the SDSU game
I’ve never cared all that much for the sports industrial complex that undergirds so much of American society, dictates certain of our activities and actions from grade school all the way through to the office water cooler. But while tailgating and watching the game, what really struck me was how wild it seemed that more than 10,000 SDSU fans would drive or fly hundreds of miles (many of them drove motorhomes and trucks and brought grills and tables and chairs) just to watch a football game.
I’ve never felt like a certain team is “my team.” I lean toward certain teams and I’ll admit to watching pro sports on TV but having any part of my identity tied to a certain team has just never resonated with me. But at one point during the SDSU game, when SDSU scored a touchdown, the whole crowd went wild and everyone was high-fiving each other and I high-fived a guy. And then I high-fived a bunch of other people I didn’t know, as well as my friends. I felt ridiculous, slightly exhilarated, and introspective almost immediately. I could not honestly recall ever having high-fived anyone before in a spirit of celebration and I wondered then what it must be like to feel like you belong to something.
The way that I watch sports is with a grain of salt, an appreciation of the stratospheric levels of athleticism of the human form combined with an understanding that the entire idea of sports in America and how it is conducted should be burned to the ground. As a caveat, so that people might have one final sendoff, I think we could have all the players from all the teams in the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL, etc., battle each other to the death in a cage match. It’s pay per view of course, and the big name stars will get weapons. That way, sports go out in one big bang, and then we rebuild a society that works for everyone. It will be a shame so many have to die, but at this point it’s really the only way.
Anyway, I had fun at the game.
Jan. 8-9
On Jan. 8 I drove 400 miles from Frisco, TX, to Monahans Sandhill State Park in West Texas. Paddle cactuses started to appear on the landscape about 40 miles east of Abilene. I’m going to find one and clip a leaf to bring home and grow my own cactus.
About 50 miles west of Abilene I hit a dust storm with 50 mph wind gusts, never a fun task when you’re towing what is essentially the side of a small barn down the highway. I kept it between 55 and 60 and eventually could taste the red dirt and then sand of the countryside in my mouth and feel it grating on my eyes. A blizzard of reddish-brown, the land here gets swept away with nothing but sparse vegetation to hold it down. But the sunset was magnified a hundred fold, so there’s your silver lining.
Speaking of sand, there’s so much of it here that all along I-20 you’ll see what are essentially sand factories. Conveyor belts not unlike what you’d see at an iron-ore mine drop sand into hundreds, maybe thousands of semi-trucks per day to be pumped underground and used for fracking here in the Permian Basin–the highest producing oil field in America. And this is no ordinary sand. This sand is so wind-whipped from spending eons of its existence in motion, busy colliding with other sand particles, that it’s nearly perfectly spherical–a key characteristic sought after for the sand used in fracking (sand from the Mississippi River basin is too coarse and inconsistently shaped). Makeshift trailer court communities dot the countryside on both sides of the interstate as these thousands of imported sand miners come to live where they work. At one of the larger ones I see a red neon sign shimmering in the 50 mph haze reading “Frac Shack.” This is also the reason why gas is about 20% less expensive than when I took this trip last year.
After sunset I pulled into Monahans, a 4,000 acre park of nothing but solitude and sand dunes, some as high as 80 feet. They even have sleds you can rent for dune sledding (which I’m doing tomorrow). Driving into the park at night, the roads had sand drifts not unlike snow drifts in Minnesota after a blizzard. I imagine the park has to plow them on occasion. I parked my camper and stood outside in the darkness of the crisp cool night and looked up to see the stars unobstructed by clouds or light and knew that I’d made the right decision to work from the road again this winter.
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